The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year-Volume Four (12 page)

"May I," she said, sounding hoarse, then swallowed. When she started again, she sounded stronger, more like the vice president of product development. "May I speak to you a moment, Ms. Milledge? In private?" She indicated the nearest kitchen door with a slight palm-up gesture, hand at her hip. Oh shit, I thought as I led the way. She looked like Des, but her vibe was all Mom, and I felt busted, like in the rec room in eighth grade. I flushed, and to my shame, tears welled up; the women in the long, dark, institutional kitchen (trimming more crusts, no doubt) were blurs. Ahead was a welcome oblong of light, a screen door that I pushed open to enter a scraggly little rose garden. In the distance, a buff shirtless boy in denim shorts rode a Toro across the church's vast back lawn.

Mrs. Creech closed both the wood door and the screen door behind us and addressed the yard boy when she said, "Thank you for not making a scene."

"I beg your pardon?"

"Of grief," she said. "A lover's grief." She plucked a pack of gum from her black velvet Christian Louboutin clutch, unsheathed a stick and folded it into her mouth. "I wondered whether you'd be here, and what you would do, but you've been very discreet, and I appreciate that. Juicy Fruit?"

"No, thanks," I said. "I can't chew gum and stifle my flamboyant dyke hysterics at the same time."

"Ha!" she said, and crossed her arms, shivering in the 70-degree afternoon. "I knew you'd be funny. That's what she always went for, smart and funny. Only never quite as smart as her, and never quite as funny, either."

"Is there something I can do for you, Mrs. Creech?"

She stared at me, then blinked and shook her head, laughed. "Forgive me," she said. "Meeting Destiny's . . . single friends . . . always brought out the worst in me. Back when she bothered to introduce them, that is. I just want to give you something." I'd seen wallets roomier than her designer purse, but she rummaged as if it were Santa's bag. "I've been boxing up Destiny's—
effects
—and I thought you would like to have this, and this, and this."

A photograph, a locket, a notebook with a zippered cover.

The photograph was of me lying beneath her on my sofa, our lips locked, my hands on her ass beneath her shorts. I had set the timer on the camera and sat next to her; she jumped me just before the flash went off, spoiling what was to have been my ceremonial "This-is-my-new-bestest-friend" photo for my parents. Dad, who is Upstate South Carolina through and through, would have taken this at face value, but Mom would have understood, being from Charleston, and would have appreciated the tact. She's tolerant of almost anything, as long as it's tolerable: neither explicit nor public. There's knowing, and there's
knowing
, as they say.

The locket was cheap and plastic and implausibly green, like something from a Lucky Charms box, and inside was a thumb-sized photo of myself, one I'd never seen. I was looking down, my face so smooth and relaxed I must have been engrossed in a book, or a cipher. This preserved intimacy embarrassed me more than the sofa photo. I thumbed shut the locket and unzipped the notebook.

I recognized it, of course. I had seen it countless times since that first afternoon in the café, but Des never had given me much chance to examine it. It pissed me off, eventually, and I gave up asking. Holding the worn, loved thing—stained not by Muddy Creek, the cover being waterproof, but by coffee and grimy fingers and constant use—seemed like a violation of the dead, especially as it had a permanent curve, having ridden for ages in a well-rounded back pocket. But I leafed through it anyway. Inside were page after page of tiny coordinates and symbols in handwritten rows that spiked across the pages like EKG printouts. Dozens, maybe hundreds, of caches, meticulously recorded.

"Look how short he's mowing this grass," Mrs. Creech said, "and no rain due this week. He's just killing it."

I focused on the numbers until I was over the locket, and able to speak.

"Thank you," I said.

"You're welcome," Mrs. Creech said. "The GPS unit was smashed, of course."

I nodded. "I have my own. A present from your daughter."

"I see. She could be very generous, I suppose, in her own way. Well, they'll be wondering what happened to me in there. Goodbye, Ms. Milledge. You won't be seeing me again." She didn't offer to shake hands this time.

"Mrs. Creech?"

"Yes?"

"How did you know my name?"

She paused on the other side of the screen door; the mesh took 20 years off her age. "You haven't reached the back of the notebook," she said. She closed the wood door behind her, leaving me outside, and I realized I wasn't meant to go back in. I flipped to the back of the notebook and found

JENNY MILLEDGE

JENNY MILLEDGE

JENNY MILLEDGE

written over and over and over in a dozen different inks and pencils, and I cried then, standing amid dry roses at the rear of a Presbyterian church.

I eventually registered that my sobs were sounding louder even as they diminished. The mower had shut off. I looked up. The buff boy was there, a towel around his neck, looking earnest and worried and eighteen, tops.

"Hey," he said. "Uh. Are you OK?"

I dragged the back of my hand across my nose, snorted and nodded. "Oh, yeah. Sure. I'm fine."

He nodded, and we both stood there.

"Thanks for asking," I said.

"No problem," he said. "You, uh, live around here?"

"Hagerstown."

He nodded again. "Cool." He glanced around, leaned in slightly. I could smell sweat and new-mown lawn. "Hey. You want to get high?"

I laughed. "You're cute," I said, "but I like girls."

He tilted back his head, and his mouth slowly formed an O of comprehension. Then he nodded and gave me a thumbs-up sign. "Awesome," he said.

And so I left my girlfriend's funeral, our love ratified by a teenage horndog.

I kept pulling the notebook out of my bedside drawer, turning it over in my hands, then putting it back. Once or twice, I confess, I put it beneath my pillow and slept on it, as if by morning it would have changed into a shiny quarter. Finally, things got so bad that I actually opened it and started leafing through the pages.

All those coordinates, each one checked off with a date. Des was good at finding things. She'd found me, hadn't she? I flipped to the back, looked at my own name for a while, then tossed the notebook onto the bed as I headed for the kitchen. Something out of the corner of my eye as the notebook landed and bounced made me stop in the doorway and look back. It had splayed open, and the visible pages looked funny, had much less writing on them than I would have expected. I picked it up and saw that these pages were new—or new to me, anyway. Same handwriting, but no check marks, no dates, just a single coordinate on the right-hand page with a gibberish row of letters beneath; on the left-hand page, four more gibberish rows.

Des, you ever hide any of these things yourself?

Yes, but since I know where those are . . .

"Oh my God," I said, carrying the notebook into the kitchen and plucking a pen from the coffee can. This wasn't a cache Des had found; this was a cache Des had
planted
.

I copied the four clues onto a single sheet of paper, one atop the other, and stared at them in a most unproductive fashion.

zmteatuxgfkmi
lmhiahdawtycz
tioxrkiainxzf
fiqieyvmogmuq

Clearly Des had used a key more sophisticated than a simple A=N substitution, otherwise
zmteatuxgfkmi
would decipher into
mzgrnghktsxzv
. Hmph. I stared at the nonsense letters, wondering what to do next, until my eyes unfocused and the rows of letters merged into a rectangular blur. Rectangular? Yes, that right margin did seem mighty regular: Was each clue the same number of letters? Yes, thirteen letters, every one.

So what? So each clue was 13 letters long, which strongly implied that the number 13 was somehow a very strong hint to cracking the cipher. Yes, each row of the geocachers' favorite shift had 13 letters—simply because each row contained half the 26 letters of the English alphabet—but suppose Des had come up with her own grid, the alphabet along one axis, a 13-letter key along the other? I had seen such charts as a kid: Tableaus, they were called.

And for whom could these clues have been meant but me?

I started jotting 13-letter words and phrases, then moved to my laptop to create Excel documents.

First I tried
DestinyCreech
—an obvious 13-letter set—down the first column, the alphabet atop the top row. The other 338 cells I filled in by using the letters of
DestinyCreech
as my starting point and completing the alphabet on each row, starting over at Z, like this:

 
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
1 D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C
2 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
3 S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
4 T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S
5 I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H
6 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M
7 Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X
8 C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B
9 R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q
10 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
11 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
12 C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B
13 H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G
 

I tried solving the first clue. I wound up with shit. I tried
DestinyCreech
across the top row with the alphabet down the side. More shit. OK, so she wasn't so egotistical as to key in her own name. I had no such compunctions, typing in
JennyMilledge
next.

Nada.

I tried catchphrases, names of friends and relatives, breakfast cereals—anything I could think of that we had talked about, laughed about, that would fit into 13 letters. After a half-hour of that, I couldn't see my Excel sheet for the tears, so I moved on to the names of famous people. I never realized there were so many 13-letter lesbians. Alison Bechdel, Barbara Jordan, Radclyffe Hall, Sheryl Swoopes, Aileen Wuornos, Rosie O'Donnell, Camille Paglia, Gertrude Stein, Jodieee Foster. (Hey, a girl can dream.) Neither Ellen De Generes nor Melissa Etheridge has 13 letters, but both
married
13 letters. Dismissed as coincidence!

When I realized this was just sad, I closed all my Excel sheets, and went for a run.

A run normally helps me think of nothing in particular, just registering the variations underfoot as cement turns to asphalt turns to brick turns to cement again, the dogs barking at me on cue behind fences and inside bay windows, the rolling sweat prickling and reddening my Scots-Irish skin. But of course I kept thinking of Des—her puzzles, her treasure hunts, her games within games. What was the point? What was her big fucking secret? I jogged in place, waiting for a bus to ease around the corner, my reflection sliding across its fuselage and startling me, the way the back of my head always startles me in the three-sided mirror in a department-store dressing room. I thought of Mrs. Creech at the funeral, the way she first spoke to my sandwich plate and not to my face, the way she had to piece me together from clues. Des' big fucking secret had been me.

I lazily cut through the Martin's parking lot. Hunched over a loaded cart, a gray-haired woman with three children in tow—grandkids?—glared at me, or maybe at the world, or at the decades that separated us. I averted my eyes as I sprinted past. I headed uphill for home, the air suddenly damp and cloying, sweat stinging my eyes. Compared to Des, I was the old woman; she had all the kid's enthusiasms: ghost stories, horror movies, treasure hunts, farts, the night sky, the taste on the tongue of stuff that wasn't meant to be tasted. "Arm sweat and leg sweat taste different," she told me the night the AC broke. "I'll show you. And your arm and my arm taste different, and your left arm tastes different from your right arm. See? Isn't that something, Jen? How can anyone ever be bored?" And then she had plucked a dog-eared Norton Anthology from the orange crate beside her bed and stood silhouetted in the window and read aloud, with great drama, while I laughed at her:

 
From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
 

And at that point in my run, just as the humidity and the storm broke, and I plunged into a sheeting downpour like a drowning pool, I realized what the 13 letters had to be.

 
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—
 

Back at the apartment, I plugged in
EdgarAllanPoe
, and what do you know? It didn't work either.

"Well, fuck me," I said aloud, sounding so much like Des, on our first meeting, that I had to laugh.

Our first meeting. When a single DVD case seemed almost to float upward and into her hand.

So I filled the left column with
SeventhVictim
, which gave me this:

 
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
1 S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R
2 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
3 V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U
4 E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D
5 N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M
6 T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S
7 H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G
8 V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U
9 I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H
10 C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B
11 T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S
12 I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H
13 M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z A B C D E F G H I J K L